Modern electronic devices, such as mobile phones or personal digital assistants, often provide the user with a range of functionalities. The mobile electronic devices can store content for example in the form of data objects, such as media files, e.g. images, videos or audio files, addresses, phone numbers, network addresses, e.g. uniform resource locators (URLs), and the like. The mobile electronic devices run applications that are capable of performing certain actions on a data object, such as displaying an image file, playing back an audio file, opening a URL or updating address information. The applications can be pre-installed on the mobile electronic device when the mobile electronic device is sold, or may be later added manually by the user.
If a user would like to handle a certain type of content on a conventional electronic device, such as an image file, the user has to remember what kind of applications are installed on the mobile electronic device that are capable of handling the type of content, or he has to search through the installed applications in order to find an appropriate application. The user may also not know that a certain installed application has a functionality for the type of content handled. This approach to handling content or data objects is rather time consuming and ineffective, and the full functionality of the installed applications may not be used. The actions that can be performed on a data object are further limited by the installed applications.
For increasing the functionality of the mobile electronic device, a user can manually install a new application or a new version of an already installed application. Yet generally, the user will not be aware of the fact that a new application capable of handling a certain type of data object exists. The user may only accidentally obtain such information, e.g. from friends, by reading or by another external information source, or he may have to explicitly search for new applications. Remembering the existence of a new application or searching actively for new applications both require a substantial amount of effort by the user, and both methods are still not able to provide the user with the latest functionalities. Conventional mobile electronic devices accordingly have a limited functionality, and increasing the functionality is time consuming and ineffective. This problem can also not be overcome by pre-installing a larger number of applications, as the pre-installed applications require storage space on the mobile electronic device and thus increase associated costs. Further, these applications may never be used, rendering their installation undesirable. Keeping the available functions up to date on a conventional mobile electronic device is thus at present either hardly possible or impractical.
It is thus desirable to keep the functionality of a mobile electronic device up to date without requiring a substantial effort by the user. It is also desirable to provide an increased range of functions for a particular type of data object without having to provide a large number of pre-installed applications. Further, it is desirable to make a mobile electronic device capable of implementing new functionalities both of already installed applications and of new applications, as soon as they become available.